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Outside Magazine January 2004

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The Hard Way
Leap Year (cont.)

And some of this is sublime. Discovering the back way to the girls' school, a paved path beneath limestone caves, past a goat pen, through tall sugarcane, around the last sugarcane factory in all of Europe, through the burnt-maple air to Colegio San Juan de Ávila. Sleeping on the rooftop on warm summer nights. Drinking a new red wine with a late dinner on the terrace and finding that Sangre de Toro has the more poetic name, but that nondescript Tarragona de Baturrica is more robust. Learning words that are so much more mellifluous than their English counterparts—melocotónes meloso, ciruelas redondo, chorizo (sweet peaches, round plums, sausage). It is through such words and such modest, quotidian undertakings that one begins, poco a poco, to learn a new language—the central challenge of living abroad.

At this moment, my daughters are at school. Addi is perhaps studying geography, learning the Spanish names for countries she never knew existed, or maybe she is working on division, which Spaniards write backward and which schoolchildren are taught to do entirely in their heads. Teal has a test spelling the ordinal numbers, primero hasta tregísimo (first through thirtieth), and later she'll be practicing the Spanish terms for the anatomy of the eye. All three of us will get another kitchen-table language lesson from Sue tonight. At the last tutorial, Sue informed me that it was time I stop speaking Spanish like a Latin Tarzan and get cracking on my conjugations.

It is not possible to know a country well without knowing its language. Language is the magic key that opens the imposing gates to another kingdom. Once inside, everything looks different, not the least of which is your mother country on the other side of the fence. What you actually see and feel and believe—that is, who you are—depends a great deal on where you're standing on the globe. Geography is destiny.

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